Just because I am in a school boy's mood. I saw this model on Star Treck with the food replicator and I immediately grasped why the LTOV was bogus. Then Q showed up and suddenly I was in the nth dimension watching a vector of pigs fly. Then it hit me: Pins dance on ferries heads not the other way around. Eureka! The age old question is solved: Just assume that there is no labour indirect or direct and bingo you can prove there is no labour involved. Paging doctor Rifkin, Paging doctor Rifkin your utopia is calling.
[WS:] If memory serves, I read a similar argument against LOTV in the "Main Currents of Marxism" by Leszek Kolakowski, written circa 1960. What you quoted seems to be just a dorky way of translating that argument into pseudo-scientific jargon.
But the general argument can be restated as follows: labor compensation has two components: the necessary cost of reproducing labour power as the Old Man repeated after Ricardo) and the economic rent (i.e. a premium charged by the provider due to his quasi monopoly position in the market (e.g. a movie or a sports star.) It is obvious that automation may drastically reduce the necessary cost of reproduction component simply by reducing or altogether eliminating human labor in certain areas, but not the economic rent component.
I think that most today's prices, at least in the developed world, are driven by the rent component, not by the reproduction of labour power (i..e. the actual cost of production) component. That is to say, a garment that sells for say $50 at Macy's has about $2 reproduction of labor power component (i.e. actual production cost) and $48 in economic rent, i.e. charge for the Macy or other designer schmuck brand.
I believe that LOTV does not say much about that $48, which IMHO limits its usefulness in explaining how modern economy works.
Wojtek
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